We were careful not to attract the attention of the police as we travelled: they track anyone who takes too close an interest in foreign workers’ welfare. A row of shacks appeared out of the darkness at the end of a dusty track, a rubble-strewn workers’ camp, like a shantytown.

An International Federation of Building and Wood Workers (IFBWW) delegation was visiting a dozen Indian and Nepalese employees on this construction site 25km northwest of the capital, Doha. Al-Rayyan will host several matches in the 2022 World Cup, in a new stadium being built on the site of the now-dismantled Ahmed Bin Ali stadium. Eight bunk beds with soiled, worn mattresses were crammed into a dormitory measuring just nine square metres. ‘We haven’t been paid for four months,’ the workers grumbled. The 80 workers in the camp were running out of basic necessities and racking up debt with local shopkeepers, who are as unscrupulous as the migrants’ employers. The traders’ high-interest loans have been added to those the workers took out to pay recruitment agencies in their home countries for putting them in touch with employers in the Gulf. What little they manage to save is sent home to their families.

Rajiv V (names have been changed to preserve anonymity) is a carpenter from West Bengal, India, and has been working in Qatar for 15 months. He sends half his monthly salary of $335 to his wife, who is raising their son alone. According to the Qatari government, foreign workers remitted over $12bn to their countries of origin in 2014. Leisure activities are unaffordable for workers, or even forbidden: according to a recent report from the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). ‘Many parts of Doha are off-limits to migrant workers, [and] are designated as family zones, further curtailing freedom of movement.’ Housed in zones far from their workplace, they work 13 hours a day, including travel time. Their collective life is limited to occasional community events. (...)